Mrs. Gaylord turned astonished eyes on me, asking: “Is ‘backslide’ a part of your ordinary vocabulary?” When I assured her that it was not, she laughed, saying that it was “a Gaylord word.” “I’m not sure that I won’t backslide when I get home again, away from these daily messages,” she said.
“Then you come to us—Margaret and me. We’ll fix you!” He drew a circle around this, as if to emphasize it. When she wondered whether she might not find a messenger nearer home to give her occasional help, he added: “You can get help, but you can’t trust everybody.”
The pencil was moving slowly, with many false starts and delays. I asked whether he would prefer planchette, and he said he would, so his mother went to her room to get it, while Mary Kendal talked to us about Manse. As soon as planchette was placed on the table, however, Frederick took possession again, moving it briskly back and forth, in a space of about six inches, as if warming it up. Mrs. Gaylord was then sitting opposite me, and Cass to the right, some distance away.
Suddenly planchette swung sharply down to the lower right-hand corner of the table, from my position, and addressing Mrs. Gaylord directly—that is, writing from right to left and upside down from my viewpoint, so that his mother sitting opposite me read it as it came—Frederick wrote rapidly and strongly:
“Mother dearest, this is your boy, come back to stay.”
We were astounded. Given a fresh surface, planchette raced all over the sheet, in energetic circles and flourishes. It ran toward me, point first, as if it would leap off the table, paused, wheeled, crossed toward Mrs. Gaylord, retreated, darted to where her hand lay on the papers, followed as she moved it, and then resumed its apparently meaningless tracing of angles and circles. When I said that I did not understand this performance, the reply came with a whirl, followed by one of his big flourishes.
“I am trying to show you that I am running this myself!” Then, very rapidly, upside down again to me: “You can’t doubt this. Even Margaret can’t doubt this.”
“I haven’t doubted that you were here, Frederick,” I said.
“No, but you’ve got to believe in me.”
Again I placed the instrument at my left, in readiness to write, as usual, across the sheet, but he had not finished. Swinging down to the right, and moving toward the left, once more reversed from my point of view, he wrote: “Mother dearest.” Then he ran to the upper right-hand corner and wrote along that edge of the table: “Now I’ll do it this way, Mr. L——.” In circles and flourishes he crossed, to write along the left edge: “Now I’ll do it this way.” Up then, to the edge opposite me. “Now I’ll do it this way.”